A Perfect Cover

A Perfect Cover

Back of the Book

Lacie Reed was the best agent to send to the Big Easy to catch a serial killer. Not just because of her stellar track record, but because the undercover operative looked exactly like the kind of woman this murderer might go for. Lacie was more than ready to play the mouse, knowing she had a big cat to catch. But once she infiltrated the small New Orleans community, befriending the very people she was trying to protect, the stakes got higher. Lacie began taking risks so big that Detective Anthony Beauprix wondered if he had hired the wrong girl for this gruesome case. Good thing Lacie always got her man. And if the sexy detective didn't watch himself, she'd get him, too....

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Maureen Tan's Bio

Maureen was born in Oceanside, California, at a hospital not too far from Camp Pendelton Marine Corps Base. Over the next decade, she moved with her parents and a growing number of siblings from Camp Pendelton to Fort Leavenworth (Kansas) to Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) to Parris Island (S. C.). Eventually, her family settled in a working-class Irish neighborhood on Chicago's south side.

Maureen's peripatetic childhood, and being the eldest of eight children, probably formed much of the headstrong and independent personality her husband first fell in love with and now good-naturedly tolerates. Their three children adapted nicely to being raised in a dual-culture household in east central Illinois by parents who despised boredom above all else.

The children have grown up and left home, but the pets remain and often leave Maureen and her husband longing for moments of boredom. They currently share their 130-year-old house with a three-legged dog named Moneypenny, three cats (Casey Jane, Baldie and Dylan) and three fish (Jaws Jr., Stumpy and NoName). Maureen's office mascot is a rat. Literally. Originally named Dude Elvis, the plump rodent was quickly renamed Dudette when a trip to the vet revealed her true nature.

Maureen has been luckier than many writers  she's always been able to make her living by writing. Of course, she hasn't always been able to write what she wants. Early in her career she ran ad campaigns for banks, savings-and-loans and manufacturers of industrial food-processing equipment. As an interpretive science writer specializing in engineering, her nonfiction has been published in such wildly popular magazines as the South African Mechanical Engineer, PM Environmental Newsletter, Water Quality International and Illinois Engineer. She wrote half-a-dozen biographical essays for Gale Research's encyclopedic Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists and, for more than a decade, she was editor of the University of Illinois Engineering Outlook.

To keep her life from becoming too boring and to expand the repertoire of real-life experiences that fuel her fiction, Maureen worked a stint as a reservist with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, serving as a public information officer in federally declared disaster areas. After that, she accepted a job as a writer for an electronic games studio, learned about "gibes" and "crunch" and briefly went to Hollywood to produce and direct the voices for Red Faction II. Maureen and one of her daughters also train dogs for search and rescue work. One of their earliest experiences was assisting in a search without their dogs and finding the body of a missing man.